At Strobe, we believe that the intersection of AI and crypto will unlock new design spaces for product creation and value distribution. This thesis underpins our investment in Dripster, a token launchpad built on Solana that reimagines how products are designed, funded, and brought to life.

From your imagination to doorstep in just two weeks, Dripster now enables virtually anyone to become a designer.  

How Dripster Works

Today, the role of product design and creation is relegated primarily to fashion houses, manufacturers, large creators, and traditional brands. Traditionally, these brands spend months designing and manufacturing pieces for every season or drop. The process for hyped up product drops from brands like Supreme, Off-White, Aimé Leon Dore are fundamentally broken. Bots snipe initial supply, dominate resale markets on StockX, GOAT, and eBay, while true buyers pay a multiple of the original sticker price. The result is a fragmented landscape where incentives are misaligned and most stakeholders (including the brands themselves) lose.

Dripster solves this by creating an ecosystem where everybody wins—from creators to communities to manufacturers. It replaces traditional "product drops" with "product launches," where creators and communities share in the financial upside of successful products and directly influence the final supply that will be brought to market.

Dripster enables users to mint "dripcoins"—tokens tied to a user-generated product design. When a dripcoin's market cap hits key milestones, token holders can claim the limited-edition physical products that Dripster’s network of manufacturers will produce. This model completely flips the current fashion and supply chain process on its head, and returns the power and financial upside back to everyday creators and their early supporters. It empowers anyone (regardless of whether they went to fashion school or have never opened Illustrator) to become a designer and create interesting items that can be brought to physical life. 

1. Design: Users upload or generate a product concept using Dripster's AI product studio. 

2. Launch: Users mint a dripcoin tied to their design on Dripster's bonding curve.

3. Fund: When the dripcoin hits $40K market cap, $8K of liquidity is deposited in Raydium and locked. Creators earn 2% of the escrowed supply as the coin graduates.

4. Claim: At preset market cap milestones (starting at $200K), physical product units become claimable by token holders. Higher market cap milestones unlock additional units—one per wallet.

5. Produce & Redeem: Token holders receive the unique physical products once production is finalized through Dripster's manufacturing network.
   

The Evolution of Token Launchpads

Unlike memecoins, dripcoins are anchored to physical products, offering intrinsic value to tradeable coins. 

Token launchpads have rapidly evolved over the past year. The first generation, exemplified by pump.fun demonstrated the massive market demand with ~$600M in revenue and 8.6B tokens created on Solana, but focused primarily on pure memecoin creation.

The second wave brought purpose-built protocols and platforms like Clanker (social-first token creation via Farcaster agents and Clanker interfaces), Virtuals (AI-agent powered tokens), Pure Markets (launchpad utilizing dutch auction dynamic bonding curves), and Flaunch (novel mechanics on Uni v4), which collectively have expanded the design space for issuing tokens with more sophisticated mechanism designs. Recent entrants like Yapster have introduced gamified social elements, while Dev.fun and Ohara are pioneering text-prompted mini-app creation with native token integration.

Dripster represents the next frontier in this evolution—bringing token launchpad mechanics to the fashion and physical product world. By combining their proven AI design platform with token-based funding mechanisms, Dripster creates a powerful new paradigm for bringing physical products to market.

Why We're Excited

Dripster is built by the team behind Off/Script (recognized as Vogue's #2 Innovation of 2024), which has amassed nearly 800K users across 100 countries to create 2M product designs spanning apparel, outerwear, sneakers, furniture, jewelry, accessories, and home goods. At Strobe, we’ve had the privilege of seeing Jonathan and Justine navigate the idea maze, and combine truly novel token mechanics with their background in AI commerce. The team has established deep manufacturing relationships with factories across 4 continents that enable Dripster to prototype new SKUs and products within 2-3 weeks. They are able to do this because under the hood, Dripster has trained their models based on the specific product sheets from these factories. The team is deeply embedded with their manufacturing network of 200+ partners who work with brands like Burberry, Adidas, and Off-White.

Speculation is a feature, not a bug: Dripster capitalizes on two of crypto's core use cases that have product-market fit this cycle: capital formation and speculation. We firmly believe that crypto is a great mechanism for capital formation, and if done correctly, Dripster can leverage memecoin dynamics to create novel real-world products. As everything moves onchain, we are now able to tokenize everything from <1 cent to billions of dollars. Unlike traditional memecoins, Dripster's tokens are anchored to physical products, providing intrinsic value while enabling communities and creators to share in the economic upside of successful launches.

Fashion's evolution into a high-velocity industry, driven by rapid trend cycles and the rise of influencer-led drops, has created an urgent need for real-time retail capabilities. Traditional brands remain constrained by manual workflows that span lengthy stakeholder reviews and complex processes that can no longer keep pace with market demands.

AI represents a solution to this bottleneck, enabling the conversion of new trend data into design concepts within minutes rather than weeks. While traditional AI image models can create compelling visuals, AI product development demands domain-specific expertise across apparel, accessories, and footwear design. By focusing on these specialized requirements, Dripster's supply chain network and models enable rapid product testing, accelerated deployment of trend-responsive items, and more precise inventory forecasting.

Real-World Products: At Strobe, we like backing teams building real world products that leverage tech in novel ways. Dripster dramatically reduces the barriers to becoming a designer. By combining Solana's efficient trading infrastructure ($20B+ in weekly trading volume) with their established design-to-delivery process, Dripster creates a powerful primitive for transforming creative concepts into tangible products. 

We believe Dripster represents the future of tokenized product creation, and are thrilled to support this team as they usher in a new type of onchain commerce. Dripster is live today on Solana, and you can start creating cool drip!

The views expressed here are those of the individual Strobe Ventures LP (“Strobe”) personnel quoted and are not the views of Strobe or its affiliates. Certain information has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by Strobe. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, Strobe has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the current or enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. In addition, this content may include third-party advertisements; Strobe has not reviewed such advertisements and does not endorse any advertising content contained therein.